Tom Goodenough is online editor of The Spectator.
A row about rainbows has broken out in football. Paris St-Germain players wore brightly coloured numbers — a show of support for this week’s ‘International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia’. But one player was missing from the line-up: Idrissa Gueye. PSG’s manager Mauricio Pochettino said that Gueye missed the game against Montpellier – which
Westminster council has fallen to the Labour party for the first time ever, as the Tories suffered a string of defeats in local elections across Britain overnight. The party also picked up Wandsworth council for the first time since 1978, with the defeated Tory council leader Ravi Govindia admitting many voters raised ‘the issue of Boris Johnson’ during
In The Spectator office’s toilets there are framed front covers of the events that didn’t happen: Corbyn beats Boris; ‘Here’s Hillary’; Jeremy Hunt wins the Tory leadership contest. The British Library has something similar at its Breaking the News exhibition. The difference is that these ones actually made it to the newsstand. It’s enough to
Can Boris recover from the storm of partygate? The Prime Minister has pinned his hopes on being exonerated – or at least not entirely condemned – by Sue Gray in her investigation into Downing Street festivities during the pandemic. And yet, whatever she says, the writing might already be on the Red Wall for Boris.
Has Azeem Rafiq been forgiven yet? He’s certainly working on it. After finding himself on both sides of a racism scandal, the former Yorkshire cricketer’s rehabilitation PR operation has been nothing if not swift. As the story broke last week that Rafiq had sent messages mocking Jewish people, he apologised immediately: ‘I am incredibly angry
Tulip Siddiq has campaigned nobly for the return of her constituent, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. The Labour MP is again doing her bit to try and persuade the Iranian government to free the British-Iranian mum, who has been locked up on trumped-up charges in Iran. ‘After over four years in Evin Prison, Nazanin has been under house arrest
‘There’s a huge prize there if we get it right,’ says Tory MP Lee Rowley of the move to net zero. But there’s a big question mark hanging over this mission: how to get there without alienating voters and damaging the economy? Andrew Griffith, Boris Johnson’s ex-chief business advisor and the government’s net zero champion,
Gary Neville was a fine footballer but he is a confused pundit. He keeps trying to get political when talking about football — and it’s boring. During England’s Euro 2020 semi-final game this summer, he obnoxiously suggested Gareth Southgate, the England manager, had shown more leadership than the Prime Minister. It was an irritating and
Are there crimes that are too depraved to be dramatised? And how long should programme makers wait before real life crime becomes the subject of a TV show? If the case of the Night Stalker – a serial burglar and rapist who terrorised south east London for 17 years during the 1990s and 2000s –
When Boris Johnson announced further lockdown restrictions this week, it was inevitable that Rishi Sunak would again splash taxpayers’ cash. The Chancellor duly delivered this afternoon. But one thing is clear: slowly but surely Sunak is turning the taps off. The Job Support Scheme, which replaces the furlough scheme, means the government will pay up
If the prospect of keeping an eye on transport secretary Grant Shapps’s Twitter feed doesn’t fill you with much joy, there’s only one option for a holiday this year: a staycation. So where is the best place in Britain to find good weather? Of course, no holiday in the UK can be guaranteed to be
What qualifies Roy Greenslade to lecture students on media ethics? It certainly doesn’t appear to be his own attitude towards telling the truth. When he taught me at City, Greenslade liked to hold forth on the vices of the tabloid press. He was quieter on his own red top past, neglecting to often mention his rise
In his fight against Putin, Alexei Navalny needs all the help he can get. The might of the Russian state is pitted against him. Having failed to kill Navalny, the Kremlin has achieved its aim, at least in the short term, of silencing him: by locking him up in prison. Navalny and his supporters have called
Marcus Rashford is right when he says the racist abuse he has received is ‘humanity and social media at its worst’. And it is right too that police take action against those who target football players like him because of the colour of their skin. But is it wise to appoint a dedicated hate crime officer
Where is England’s ‘valley of the kings’? You’d be forgiven for not knowing. The Anglo-Saxon monarchs buried there are, like much of the rest of that period, little more than a footnote in the crash course in history you get at school. When the Romans headed home in the fourth century, it’s often thought that
More than 30 countries – including Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and Thailand – will not allow travellers arriving from the UK to enter after a new variant of coronavirus was detected. Here are the measures countries around the world have imposed on Brits: France: The country halted all arrivals from the UK from midnight last
Is Boris Johnson really Prime Minister? Or is Marcus Rashford? It’s not hard to see why some are confused. Whenever the Manchester United footballer has opened his mouth – not least on helping children who get free school meals during holidays – Boris has, often reluctantly, bowed to Rashford’s requests. Rashford’s latest project, a book club
Sir Patrick Vallance and Professor Chris Whitty have come under fire over slides used during the weekend announcement of the second Covid-19 lockdown. Today, the pair hit back. A chart suggesting there could be up to 4,000 deaths per day by December under a reasonable worst-case scenario was described by Oxford expert Carl Heneghan as ‘now proven to
From Friday night, southerners are set to be cooped up in their homes because of high Covid rates in the north. I’m talking, of course, about the decision to impose tier two restrictions on London. The capital’s nine million people will be banned from socialising indoors with people they don’t live with and commuters urged
When it comes to tackling climate change, the EU has always been eager to talk the talk. In 2011, the Commission vowed to spend a fifth of its upcoming budget on ‘climate action’. Last year, it went even further: it said that one euro in every four – or 320 billion euros (£290bn) – was going
